I was working on a post on the idea of us being professional, and that that even means. Mike Hill (@geepawhill) beat me to it. Go read his post. While you’re there, check out his other posts… it’s all good.

In his RailsConf keynote Bob Martin channeled Ward Cunningham to say that Smalltalk died because “It was too easy to make a mess”.

Whether Smalltalk is dead is the subject of much debate. Technically it’s not. There is ongoing development on the language and tools (notable by Cincom). But for all intents and purposes, it is no longer a commercially viable language. That said, it’s cool, and was a great context in which to learn OO. For that I am forever grateful to it.

I, personally, don’t think that “being easy to make a mess” was the cause of Smalltalk’s downfall. Sure, it was easy… but it’s easy to make a mess in any language. I have to agree with James Robertson that Smalltalk makes it easier to clean up your messes.

I was a serious Smalltalk user ‘back in the day’.. in the late 80s & early 90s: ObjectWorks, VisualWorks, Digitalk. I used it both in industry (some early CDROM shrinkwrapped products as well as client server) and academically (for my MSc thesis work). It was a wonderful language and environment. I saw firsthand, a few things that I believe lead to it’s demise:

• The unfamiliarity of the language and environment,
• The incompetence of the company tasked with commercializing it (ParcPlace), with their ridiculous licensing/royalty demands, and
• Arrogance, but not so much of the community, but of the environments themselves. It was beautifully cross platform, but at the expense of a truly native environment. In fact it was quite late into the game that you had windows out on your desktop instead of in it’s own self-contained world or even with simulated platform look & feel. As I said, that changed, but I believe it was too little, too late. There were some native implementations that were reasonably good.. but none approached the power of those descending directly from the PARC codebase. And Squeak, the shiny new smalltalk, goes back to that we-are-the-world arrogance.

So.. no… I don’t think what “killed” Smalltalk will kill Ruby. We’ve learned a lot since the 80s… a lot about how to keep a system healthy. The TATFT attitude is part of it. Notice I said attitude, and not practice.

We still can learn a lot from Smalltalk, specifically from it’s toolset. When we finally have good, useful Ruby IDEs they won’t look like Java IDEs. They’ll look like Smalltalk IDEs.

So… Smalltalk dead? Yes, no, does it matter? Smalltalk lives on in Ruby.

As I’ve mentioned on Twitter & Facebook, I’m back to doing Ruby & Rails fulltime.

Joining Google took me out of the Rails community & largely out of the Ruby community. At least until very recently when I joined a Rails project (yes, at Google.. who’da thought).

As noted on my blog last spring, I had the rug pulled out from under me with a sudden onset of diabetes.

With all that I pretty much pulled an Austin Powers and went into cold storage for a year & a half.

Well, I’ve thawed out and am back at it… Ruby, Rails, and hanging with peeps at conferences. Look for me on speaker lists before too much longer.

After GoGaRuCo and RailsConf, I’m back, motivated, and enthused like never before.

Hot of the virtual presses:

Well, RSpec is doing well. A couple things of note recently:

• part of the install on hivelogic’s rails install instructions
• clear majority favorite on a recent twtpoll:
  
  
• with merb being rolled into Rails, there’s speculation that RSpec will be supported by Rails out of the box… that’d be cool

or ¿Por qué tu código apesta?

My friend, Israel Antezana in Bolivia, translated my “Why Your Code Sucks” post into Spanish. Check it out on his blog.

I just spent a couple of enjoyable days at Agile Open California 2008. And openspace-based Agile Software Development conference.

I was quite impressed with the format of the conference. I hadn’t been to a fully openspace conference before, and thought it worked really well and was pretty cool.

I made some new acquaintances and reconnected with several existing ones. Always a good thing.

Happy Talk Like a Pirate day!

Several friends I follow on Twitter are using Skitch. For example, check out Robbie Russell’s LOLBUGZ examples.

I just downloaded the beta version and will be using it whenever I can. So far it’s just like Plasq’s other product.. i.e. amazingly outstanding!

Added a paragraph about the ZX81.

Tagged by David Chelimsky.

How old were you when you started programming?

Mid teens. I can’t remember exactly when, but it was around the time I started high school.

How did you get started programming?

That I remember vividly. In the town I grew up in we had a “Teacher’s College”.. basically an college that you went to for essentially a bachelor’s degree in education. Their library was open to the public, and they had some computers. Specifically several Commodore PETs. I’m not sure of the exact model, but they looked exactly like this. I played around with those for a while, mostly typing in programs from Creative Computing and the Basic Games books by David Ahl. Before long I was experimenting withmy own programs.

The library also had a couple Bell & Howell Apple ][+s… the black ones.. which I still consider one of the coolest looking computers ever made. I recall that you had to pass some sort of test before being allowed to use those… which I did and haven’t looked back since.

Shortly thereafter I got a Sinclair ZX81. I spent a few years hacking both software and hardware for this, including a full size case and keyboard, and a sound system based on the sound chip from the Commodore 64.

What was your first language?

BASIC

What was the first real program you wrote?

I truly have no idea.

What languages have you used since you started programming?

In roughly chronological order: Basic, Z80 Assembly, 6502 Assembly, 6800 Assembly, Pascal, Forth, C, LISP, C++, Modula2, Prolog, Smalltalk, Java, Ruby, Python, ObjectiveC. I’ve likely forgotten some.

What was your first professional programming gig?

That depends on what is meant by “professional”… so I’ll give a few answers.

The first program I got paid to write was on those black Apples… a graphics heavy educational program for little kids… colour & shapes. I used 6502 assembly for it.

The first real job (part time in high school) programming was developing an environmental control & monitoring system in Z80 assembly on custom hardware, which also involved some hardware design & prototyping.

After high school I did some similar work on a consulting basis.

My first “day job” was after grad school, at a startup working on early multimedia CDROM based edutainment (reference/training) products, in Smalltalk for Windows 3.11. That would have been in ~93.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

Never stop learning. Learn new platforms, new languages, new techniques, new ideas. Learn languages that are very different from what you already know. Don’t worry about them being directly applicable… the more important thing is the ideas and concepts that you’ll learn.. new ways of looking at things.

What’s the most fun you’ve ever had programming?

Three fairly recent things stick out in my mind. Not surprising, both involved programming in Ruby:

• working on RSpec with David Chelimsky and Aslak Hellesoy when the 3 of us were working in the Chicago area,
• taking part in the 2007 Rails Rumble with Nancy, the love of my life, and
• deciding at 5pm on a saturday night to write an iPhone app, and having a demoable version deployed to a device by 3am monday morning… with minimal sleep during the process.

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